Hi, On Fri, 27 Jul 2018, Michael Matz wrote:
> Using any python scripts as part of generally building GCC (i.e. where > the generated files aren't prepackaged) will introduce a python > dependency for distro packages. And for those distros that bootstrap a > core cycle of packages (e.g. *SUSE) this will include python (and all > its dependencies) into that bootstrap cycle. > > That will be terrible. Oh, and of course, I haven't read any really convincing arguments for why python would be so much better than awk to counter the disadvantages. Building a compiler (especially one that regards itself as a multi-target/host one) should have extremely few prerequisites (ideally only a compiler and runtime for the language its written in), and I wouldn't call a full python distro that (no matter how much people claim that getting the necessary subset of python is mostly trivial. compiling any random awk is trivial, especially given a compiler you already need anyway; python is not). Hell, if anything I'd say we should rewrite the awk scripts into POSIX sh (!). I'll concede that for text processing AWK is nicer ;-) So, if it's only for a minor convenience of writing some text processing scripts, no, that's not a good reason to complicate our prerequisites. (The helper scripts in contrib/ as long as they aren't used during GCC build can use any fancy language they want) Ciao, Michael.
